This is another brief follow-up to my “Life in Patreonia” post, based on this analysis. It can be summed up as follows: there is no significant correlation between the number of patrons of a Patreon project and the earnings per patron, although the earnings per patron does decline very slightly as projects become more popular.

The numbers: across almost 130,000 projects reporting nonzero earnings from monthly charges in December 2022, average earnings per patron was $6.83 and median earnings per patron was $4.50. Fitting a simple linear model predicts that each additional patron is worth $3.98. There’s a fair amount of variability, though: one project earned less than a penny per patron, while another earned over a thousand dollars from just one patron. (As you might have guessed, it was an NFSW project.)

I also looked into the (in)famous Kevin Kelly claim that creators aiming to make a living in the Internet age just need to find “1,000 true fans” willing to pony up $100 or more per year. How’s that working out for Patreon projects?

Only 31 Patreon projects (about 0.02% of all projects with nonzero monthly earnings) met the specific criteria of having 1,000 or more patrons and per patron earnings of $100 or more per year (assuming December 2022 earnings were representative). If we use the looser criterion of earning $100,000 or more per year (regardless of the number of patrons), 238 projects met that, about 0.18% of all projects with nonzero monthly earnings in December 2022. I think finding 1,000 “true fans” is a lot harder than Kelly thought.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-02-07 19:54

i literally just watched an overall good video that pushed the 1000 true fans thing as a partial solution to the issues of the attention economy, this puts it into a lot of perspective…

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-02-07 20:56

Thanks for stopping by! Yeah, Kevin Kelly in particular has been dining out on the “1000 true fans” thing for years; it’s still the most popular post on his site. (But to give Kelly his due, his “scenius” post is excellent and I think essentially correct, even though he didn’t invent the term himself.)